American Insurrection Attempts to Shine a Light on Hate Groups Operating In Broad Daylight

Another day in America, another racist killing. A Black man, Daunte Wright, shot dead for a dangling air freshener. Another documentary laying bare the vicious and institutionalized hate in our country, another example of journalists, filmmakers and social media activists seeking justice by telling the same story. A collaboration between PBS’s Frontline, ProPublica and UC Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program, writer/director Rick Rowley’s documentary American Insurrection follows journalist A.C. Thompson as he loosely tracks the increasingly violent, open and fearless alt-right over the course of Donald Trump’s presidency, from Charlottesville’s Unite the Right rally to the insurrection at the capitol. With interviews that’ll make your skin crawl, American Insurrection can still feel as powerless and lost as the rest of us who watched a mob attack Congress on January 6.

The doc retreads some ground from Rowley and Thompson’s Documenting Hate: Charlottesville, further exploring the ingrained connection between the alt-right and the military while expanding its thesis to include the latest and greatest from America’s neverending supply of creative hate. It’s our cottage industry, after all.

Covering both large-scale group events (Charlottesville, the Portland right-wing rallies, the Richmond gun rights protest) and more specific criminal acts (those of Steven Carrillo, the planned kidnapping of Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer), we watch Thompson and other investigative reporters put boots on the ground—but their reporting can only be so confrontational considering how violent these people are. Thompson already wears a bulletproof vest. And that’s mostly ok, seeing as the point of the doc is more about shedding light on the movement’s facets than exposing individuals.

And as we see in an interview with a young militant faction’s leader, these aren’t individuals that really fear exposure. There’s a bit of DIY media training that goes into being this kind of asshole: A group of people, who’ve grown up knowing exactly how far they can explicitly go without getting banned from social media or other online forums, saying just enough. Standard journalistic professionalism is drowned out by dog whistles. That’s part of what makes American Insurrection a frustrating watch. For every reported-out connection showing the direct line between different hate groups and/or the U.S. military, there’s another kids gloves interview that just feels like giving yet another platform to these people. People who claim to have left the Klan behind for more “acceptable” hate groups like the Proud Boys, who explain that they are actually not extreme any more, thank you very much, simply because there was someone in the White House that legitimized their views. For anyone paying attention (or watching PBS, for that matter), that line of thinking has been clear for years. At least the doc touches on the radical right in its most presently dangerous form, ignoring the hateful confusion exploited in and around QAnon conspiracies in favor of the militarized boogaloo movement’s wannabe tactical doomsday preppers.

The latter is another example of a violent group using a childish name to mask their seriousness (Boogaloo Bois, Proud Boys, Lads Society—it’s no coincidence that so many market themselves as places of youthful male acceptance and solidarity) and yet another link directly tying these groups to militarized institutions. You may have seen their military-adjacent memes if you know people who’ve served and, like 4chan’s Nazification of poor Pepe the Frog, they are just the surface images helping to make their radical violence go down smooth—and identify like-minded people ready to put the ideology into action. The doc focuses on that action rather than the pipeline leading people to it, more pressingly covering the violent results rather than the toxic causes.

While Thompson makes some of these connections more specific and clear—noting shared backgrounds and common faces associated with different movements popping up at these big events, eventually leading to the insurrection—it’s a recap of recent history that’s still so raw and evolving as to feel unfinished. The FBI’s Twitter account is still posting images of unidentified insurrectionists, looking to crowdfund justice like they were an American needing surgery. When the film’s final half-hour brings us to the title event, its nauseating on-the-ground footage is the most gripping of the doc, though—again—for those who’ve followed the news, it’s not revelatory. It’s more like biting once again into something rotten, disgusted to find the same fetid decay lingering in our nation’s neglected fridge. It’s horrible, but what did we expect? To learn something?